When asked if she writes literary or commercial fiction, author Jane Davis leans toward commercial fiction for several reasons. For one thing, commercial sells relatively better than literary fiction and allows her to buy random items like food. She’s also slightly wary of claiming the same status as others writers such as Dickens and winners of the Booker Prize.

The author of six completed novels including, most recently, An Unknown Woman, which won Writing Magazine’s Self-Published Book of the Year Award, Davis does admit to sharing some of the same characteristics as literary writers. Davis writes slow and shudders at the idea of using word count as an effective measure of writing progress.

But, overall, she remains only slightly willing to admit her work is literary. Even if you DO write such fiction, an agent once told her, keep it as commercial as possible.